Mindful Hack

The Mindful Hack is a Web log of Denyse O'Leary, co-author of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (HarperOne August 2007). The Mindful Hack publishes information of interest on the relationship between the mind and the brain. O'Leary also publishes the Post-Darwinist, which keeps up with the intelligent design controversy.

Enter your search termsSubmit search form

Thursday, September 13, 2007

The Spiritual Brain: Introduction

Because so many people have asked me what The Spiritual Brain:A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul addresses, I thought I would post the Introduction. It doesn't deal with everything the book addresses, but it gives you some idea.

In this book, we intend to show you that your mind does exist, that it is not merely your brain. Your thoughts and feelings cannot be dismissed or explained away by firing synapses and physical phenomena alone. In a solely material world, "will power" or "mind over matter" are illusions, there is no such thing as purpose or meaning, there is no room for God. Yet many people have experience of these things. We intend to argue that these experiences are real. In contrast, many materialists now argue that notions like meaning or purpose do not correspond to reality; they are merely adaptations for human survival. In other words, they have no existence beyond the evolution of circuits in our brains.

Can we prove God exists from neuroscience? No, but if your mind is real, a cosmic Mind would best account for it. If spirituality is good for you (and it is), that's because spirituality responds to the way things really are in our universe. Come along with us and see for yourself.

Denyse's Pearcey Report op-ed: Of science reporters and meat puppets

The question that intrigued me through the many months of long nights, researching and writing on all these topics, was -- why do the popular science media accept so much nonsense when the facts are so readily available?

One possible answer is that most science writers simply know little about spirituality. I am one of the few who is a member of both a confessional Christian writers organization and a national science writers association. When you don't know much about a topic, you can easily believe things that you would never believe if you did.

Of course, the science reporters are capable people. But they are stuck with a completely unsatisfactory way of understanding spiritual experiences, and it goes downhill from there.

Part One: Neuroscience as if your mind is real

In this book, we intend to show you that your mind does exist, that it is not merely your brain. Your thoughts and feelings cannot be dismissed or explained away by firing synapses and physical phenomena alone. Are our questions about our meaning or purpose merely survival mechanisms? If such an airy dismissal of the intellectual life of thousands of years sounds vaguely unconvincing, well, perhaps it should.

When my doctoral student Vincent Paquette and I first undertook to study the spiritual experiences of Carmelite nuns at the Université de Montréal, we knew that our motives were quite likely to be misunderstood.

First, we had to convince the nuns that we were not trying to prove that religious experiences do not occur or that a brain glitch explains them. Then we had to quiet both the hopes of professional atheists and the fears of clergy about the possibility that we were trying to reduce spiritual experiences to some kind of "God switch" in the brain.

Many neuroscientists want to do just that. But Vincent and I belong to a minority—nonmaterialist neuroscientists. Most scientists today are materialists who believe that the physical world is the only reality. Absolutely everything else, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena--leaving no room for the possibility that religious experiences are anything but an illusion. Materialists are like Charles Dicken's character Ebeneezer Scrooge who dismisses his experience of Marley's ghost as merely "an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato."

Vincent and I, on the other hand, did not approach our research with any such materialist presumption. As we are not materialists, we did not doubt in principle that a contemplative might contact a reality outside herself during a mystical experience. In fact, I went into neuroscience in part because I knew experientially that such things can indeed happen. Vincent and I simply wanted to know what the neural correlates—the activity of the neurons—during such an experience might be. Given the overwhelming dominance of materialism in neuroscience today, we count ourselves lucky that the nuns believed in our sincerity and agreed to help us, and that the Templeton Foundation saw fit to fund our studies.

Of course, you may well ask, can neuroscience studies of contemplative nuns demonstrate that God exists? No, but they can—and did—demonstrate that the mystical state of consciousness really exists. In this state, the contemplative likely experiences aspects of reality that are not available in other states. These findings rule out various materialist theses that the contemplative is faking or confabulating the experience. Vincent and I also showed that mystical experiences are complex experiences, which rules out a vast variety of simplistic materialist explanations such as a "God gene," "God spot" or "God switch" in our brains.

Toronto-based journalist Denyse O'Leary and I have written this book to discuss the significance of these studies, and more generally, to provide a neuroscientific approach to understanding religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences. As I wrote above, neuroscience today is materialist. That is, it assumes that the mind is quite simply the physical workings of the brain. To see what this means, consider a simple sentence: "I made up my mind to buy a bike." One would not say, "I made up my brain to buy a bike." By contrast, one might say, "Bike helmets prevent brain damage," but not "bike helmets prevent mind damage."

But materialists think that the distinction you make between your mind as an immaterial entity and your brain as a bodily organ has no real basis. The mind is assumed to be a mere illusion generated by the workings of the brain. Some materialists even think you should not in fact use terminology that implies that your mind exists.

In this book, we intend to show you that your mind does exist, that it is not merely your brain. Your thoughts and feelings cannot be dismissed or explained away by firing synapses and physical phenomena alone. In a solely material world, "will power" or "mind over matter" are illusions, there is no such thing as purpose or meaning, there is no room for God. Yet many people have experience of these things. We intend to argue that these experiences are real. In contrast, many materialists now argue that notions like meaning or purpose do not correspond to reality; they are merely adaptations for human survival. In other words, they have no existence beyond the evolution of circuits in our brains. As co-discoverer of the genetic code Francis Crickwrites in The Astonishing Hypothesis, "Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive and leave descendants." But are our questions about our meaning or purpose merely survival mechanisms? If such an airy dismissal of the intellectual life of thousands of years sounds vaguely unconvincing, well, perhaps it should.

Part Two: Who has enough faith to be a materialist?

One convenient aspect of materialism is that any doubt can be labeled "unscientific" in principle. That preempts a discussion of materialism's plausibility. Certainly, materialism is a faith that many intellectuals would never think of questioning. But the strength of their conviction neither shows that it is a correct account of reality nor provides evidence in its favor.

Suppose, for example, a healthy man donates a kidney for free to a dying stranger. The materialist may look for an analogy among moles, rats, mole rats, or chimpanzees, as the best way to understand the donor's motives. He believes that the donor's mind can be completely explained by the hypothesis that his brain was built up painstakingly in slow steps from the brains of creatures like these. Therefore, his mind is merely an illusion created by the workings of an overdeveloped brain, and his consciousness of his situation is actually irrelevant as an explanation of his actions.

This book argues that the fact that the human brain evolves does not show that the human mind can be dismissed in this way. Rather, the human brain can enable a human mind, whereas the mole brain cannot (with my apologies to the mole species). The brain, however, is not the mind; it is an organ suitable for connecting a mind to the rest of the universe. By analogy, Olympic swimming events require an Olympic class swimming pool. But the pool does not create the Olympic events; it makes them feasible at a given location. From the materialist perspective, our human mind's consciousness and free will are problems to be explained away. To see what this means, consider Harvard cognitive scientist Steve Pinker's comments on consciousness in a recent piece in Time magazine (January 19, 2007). Addressing two key problems that scientists face, he writes,

Although neither problem has been solved, neuroscientists agree on many features of both of them, and the feature they find least controversial is the one that many people outside the field find the most shocking. Francis Crick called it "the astonishing hypothesis" – the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.

Given that Pinker admits that neither problem concerning consciousness is either solved or anywhere close to being solved, how can he be so sure that consciousness is merely "the activity of the brain", with the implication that he draws out, that there is no soul?

One convenient aspect of Pinker's materialism is that any doubt can be labeled "unscientific" in principle. That preempts a discussion of materialism's plausibility. Certainly, materialism is a faith that many intellectuals would never think of questioning. But the strength of their conviction neither shows that it is a correct account of reality nor provides evidence in its favor.

A good case can be made for the opposite view, as this book will demonstrate. Yes, this book - departing from a general trend in books on neuroscience aimed at the general public - does question materialism. Much more than that, it presents evidence that materialism is not true. You will see for yourself that the evidence for materialism is not nearly so good as Steve Pinker would like you to believe. You can only retain your faith in materialism by assuming - on faith - that any contrary evidence you read about must be wrong.

For example, as we will relate, a materialist readily believes - without any reliable evidence whatever - that great spiritual leaders suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy rather than that they have spiritual experiences that inspire others as well as themselves. Where spirituality is concerned, this experiential data is an embarrassment to narrow materialism. That is because a system like materialism is severely damaged by any evidence against it. Consequently, data that defy materialism are simply ignored by many scientists. For instance, materialists have conducted a running war against psi research (research on knowledge or action at a distance) for decades, because any evidence of psi's validity, no matter how minor, is fatal to their ideological system. Recently, for example, self-professed skeptics have attacked atheist neuroscience grad student Sam Harris for having proposed, in his book titled The End of Faith (2004), that psi research has validity. Harris is only following the evidence, as we shall see. But in doing so, he is clearly violating an important tenet of materialism: Materialist ideology trumps evidence.

Part Three: The uses of non-materialist neuroscience

There is such a thing as "mind over matter." We do have will power, consciousness, and emotions, and combined with a sense of purpose and meaning, we can effect change.

But other challenges to materialism exist, other evidence. Materialists must believe that their minds are simply an illusion created by the workings of the brain, and therefore that free will does not really exist and could have no influence in controlling any disorder. But non-materialist approaches have clearly demonstrated mental health benefits. Here are a few examples discussed in this book:

Similarly, some of my neuroscientist colleagues at the Université de Montréal and I have demonstrated, via brain imaging techniques, that

– women and young girls can voluntarily control their level of response to sad thoughts, though young girls found it more difficult to do so.

– men who view erotic films are quite able to control their responses to them, when asked to do so.

– people who suffer from phobias such as spider phobia can reorganize their brains so that they lose the fear.

Evidence of the mind's control over the brain is actually captured in these studies. There is such a thing as "mind over matter." We do have will power, consciousness, and emotions, and combined with a sense of purpose and meaning, we can effect change.

Part Four: Materialism is running on empty

Non-materialist neuroscience is not compelled to reject, deny, explain away, or treat as problems all evidence that defies materialism. That is convenient because current research is turning up a growing body of such evidence.

At one time, materialist explanations of spirituality were at least worth considering. For example, Sigmund Freud argued that childhood memories of a father figure led religious people to believe in God. Freud's explanation failed because Christianity is the only major religion that emphasizes the fatherhood of God. But his idea, while wrong, was not ridiculous. Relationships with fathers, happy or otherwise, are complex human experiences, with some analogies to spirituality. Similarly, anthropologist J.G. Frazer thought that modern religions grew out of primal fertility cults and were only later spiritualized. Actually, the evidence points more clearly to spiritual experiences as the source of later religious beliefs and rituals. Still, Frazer's idea was far from trivial. It derived from a long and deep acquaintance with ancient belief systems.

But recently materialistic explanations of spirituality have gotten out of hand. Influenced by this materialistic prejudice, popular media jump at stories about the violence gene, the fat gene, the monogamy gene, the infidelity gene, and now, even a God gene! Evolutionary psychologists attempt to explain human spirituality by insisting that cave dwellers in the remote past who believed in a supernatural reality were more likely to pass on their genes than cave dwellers who didn't. Progress in genetics and neuroscience has encouraged some to look, quite seriously, for such a God gene, or else a God spot, module, factor, or switch in the human brain. By the time the amazing "God helmet" (a snowmobile helmet modified with solenoids which purportedly could stimulate subjects to experience God) in Sudbury, Canada, became a magnet for science journalists in the ‘90s (the Decade of the Brain), materialism was just about passing beyond parody. Nonetheless, materialists continue to search for a God switch. Such comic diversions aside, there is no escaping the non-materialism of the human mind.

Essentially, there is no God switch. As the studies with the Carmelite nuns have demonstrated and this book will detail, spiritual experiences are complex experiences, like our experiences of human relationships. They leave signatures in many parts of the brain. That fact is consistent with (though it does not by itself demonstrate) that the experiencer contacts a reality outside herself.

The fact is, materialism is stalled. Not only does it have no useful hypotheses for the human mind or spiritual experiences, it is not close to developing any. Just beyond lies a great realm that cannot even be entered via materialism, let alone explored. But the good news is that, in the absence of materialism, there are hopeful signs that it can indeed be entered and explored with modern neuroscience.

Non-materialist neuroscience is not compelled to reject, deny, explain away, or treat as problems all evidence that defies materialism. That is convenient because current research is turning up a growing body of such evidence. Three examples addressed in this book are the psi effect, near death experiences (NDEs), and the placebo effect.

The psi effect, as seen in such phenomena as extrasensory perception and psychokinesis, is a low level effect, to be sure, but efforts to disconfirm it have failed. Near death experiences have also become a more frequent subject of research in recent years, probably because the spread of advanced resuscitation techniques has created a much larger population that survives to recount them. As a result of the work of researchers such as Pim van Lommel, Sam Parnia, Peter Fenwick, and Bruce Greyson, we now have a growing base of information. The results do not support a materialist view of mind and consciousness, as advanced by Pinker, who writes in Time "when the physiological activity of the brain ceases, as far as anyone can tell the person's consciousness goes out of existence."

Most of us have not experienced unusual effects like psi or NDE, but we have all probably experienced the placebo effect: Have you ever gone to your doctor to get a letter saying you can't go to work because you have a bad cold—and suddenly begun to feel better while sitting in the clinic, leafing through magazines? It's embarrassing, but easy to explain: Your mind generates messages to begin the analgesic or healing processes when you accept that you have in fact started on a path to recovery. Materialist neuroscience has long regarded the placebo effect as a problem, but it is one of the best attested phenomena in medicine. But for non-materialist neuroscience, it is a normal effect that can be of great therapeutic value when properly used.

Materialism is apparently unable to answer key questions about the nature of being human and has little prospect of ever answering them intelligibly. It has also convinced millions of people that they should not seek to develop their spiritual nature because they have none. Some think that the solution is to continue to uphold materialism a bit more raucously than before. Currently, key materialist spokespersons have launched a heavily publicized and somewhat puzzling "anti-God" crusade. Anti-theistic works such as Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Daniel Dennett), The God Delusion (Richard Dawkins), God: The Failed Hypothesis — How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist (Victor J. Stenger), God Is Not Great (Christopher Hitchens) and Letters to a Christian Nation (Sam Harris) are accompanied by conferences such as the Science Network's "Beyond Belief" and campaigns such as the YouTube Blasphemy Challenge.

The remarkable thing is that there isn't a single new idea in all that they have to say. Eighteenth century philosophes said it all long ago, to as much or little purpose. Granted, recent works have been spiced with the questionable assumptions of evolutionary psychology—the attempt to derive spirituality from the practices that may have enabled a few of our Pleistocene ancestors to pass on their genes. But the Pleistocene ancestors are long gone, and not much can really be learned from a discipline that lacks a subject. There are also plenty of assurances about the illusory nature of consciousness and free will, and the uselessness or danger of spirituality. A variety of experts of the mid-twentieth century had predicted that spirituality would slowly but surely disappear. Once supplied with abundant material goods, people would just stop thinking about God. But the experts were wrong. Spirituality today is more varied, but it is growing all over the world. Thus, its continuing vitality prompts speculations, fears, and some pretty wild guesses—but most of all, a compelling curiosity, a desire to investigate.

But how can we investigate spirituality scientifically? To start with, we can rediscover our nonmaterialist inheritance. It has always been there, just widely ignored. Famous neuroscientists such as Charles Sherrington, Wilder Penfield, and John Eccles, were not in fact reductive materialists, and they had good reasons for their position. Today, non-materialist neuroscience is thriving, despite the limitations imposed by widespread misunderstanding and, in a few cases, hostility. Readers are urged to approach all the questions and evidence presented in this book with an open mind. This is a time for exploration, not dogma.

Our book will establish three key ideas: The non-materialist approach to the human mind is a rich and vital tradition that accounts for the evidence much better than the currently stalled materialist one.

Second, non-materialist approaches to the mind result in practical benefits and treatments, as well as promising approaches to phenomena that materialist accounts cannot even address.

And lastly – this may be the most important value for many readers – our book shows that when spiritual experiences transform lives, the most reasonable explanation – the one that best accounts for all the evidence – is that the people who have such experiences have actually contacted a reality outside themselves, a reality that has brought them closer to the real nature of the universe.